You can’t determine the effectiveness of your SEO strategy without tracking the performance of your site. You will need to use various rank tracker tools to achieve it. When using SEO performance tracking tools, track these key performance indicators (KPI). Most of the below metrics can be tracked using Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Organic Traffic
The most important SEO metric is considered organic traffic and that’s why it’s probably the most commonly tracked metric as well. The traffic your website receives from organic search results on search engines is called organic traffic. It shows the ability of a website to attract visitors.
Higher organic traffic means your website’s SEO performance is good. Your website is ranked on search engines for many keywords and the tiles or content are good enough that people are opening your website.
You can check out different details of your visitors like the devices they are using, their location, and others to understand your audience and create better content or SEO strategy to attract a wider audience.
Monitoring organic traffic will allow you to detect a sudden drop in traffic and help you fix the problem that caused it like website issues, competitors doing better than you, a Google algorithm update, etc.
Keyword Ranking
You can check the ranking of your website with respect to each keyword to know which keyword is ranking well. You will have a list of keywords that you would want to rank on and tracking those keywords will show you your performance. You can take action and improve your keyword ranking.
But keep in mind that many factors contribute to the keyword ranking. It’s not only the selection of the keywords. So, you must track other metrics with keyword ranking for creating a good SEO plan.
Impressions And Clicks
Impressions show how many times your website appeared on search engines in organic search. It must be coupled with clicks. Clicks mean how many clicks your website received after appearing on search engine results.
You can use impressions alone for noticing if your website is getting ranked for keywords. Impressions will show that your SEO plan is at least making your website visible on search engines for specific keywords.
However, by combining these two metrics you can check the average click-through rate or average CTR and learn which percentage of people are clicking the website.
CTR = clicks/impressions x 100
So, if your website gets 100 impressions and 20 clicks, the CTR will be 20%.
If you notice that your website has a high number of impressions but a low number of clicks, the click-through rate will be lower and shows that the website is ranking for the keywords, but people are not clicking on it.
So, you should try changing the titles and meta descriptions and also check if the page is relevant to the search query it’s ranked for to increase the click through rate. You must track it every day because when search engines notice a low CTR of a website, they take that the website is not helpful enough for users and should get a lower rank. Therefore, if you delay fixing a low CTR, your website might see low impressions soon.
Branded Traffic
When a user searches a term on a search engine that also includes your company or website name, it’s called branded traffic. In branded traffic, the conversation rate will be higher because the visitors will already know about your company and as they are searching for your brand, they are more likely to buy from you. With better brand awareness campaigns, you can improve branded traffic.
Bounce Rate
A bounce rate shows how many people left your website without taking action like filling out a form, visiting other pages of your website, etc. The average bounce rate is between 30% to 70%. But you should try to keep it between 25% to 40%.
However, if your website’s bounce rate is high such as 90%, you should check the causes and fix them. Common reasons for a high bounce rate can be website errors, excessive use of bots, bad design, and slow website speed. Keep in mind that paid social media and search ads also lead to a higher bounce rate and so does a higher number of mobile traffic to your website.
Cost Per Click
It’s not the cost of clicks that you pay for online ads to search engines and social media platforms. For organic traffic to your website from search engines, you don’t have to pay anything. However, you will be spending on SEO tools and other stuff for ranking on search engines so you should factor in this cost.
To determine the cost per click, divide your cost for SEO with your website traffic. If your website is new, a high CPC is fine and it should decrease over time. This will show that your SEO plans are successful. Check out the rank tracker pricing to find an affordable SEO monitoring tool.
Pages That Trigger Visitors To Leave
If you check the Google Analytics of your website, you may notice that visitors are leaving your site after visiting some pages. Check the drop-off positions of your site to learn why people are exiting your site after visiting those pages.
You can then create a plan to reduce the number of exits of visitors from the pages. For instance, those pages might have links of other sites that they go on browsing from your site. So, analyze your date and then formulate a strategy.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is how many of the customers who visited your site performed your desired action. The desired action can be signing up for the newsletter or buying a product.
New websites and online stores should have an uptrend in their conversion rate while established stores should maintain a good conversion rate for ensuring that enough visitors are turning into customers.
Google Crawls
Crawling means that the bots of a search engine have visited your pages. Everyone keeps updating their sites for better SEO results, so you should take note of the number of Google crawls your website is getting.
You can use Google Search Console for checking out the crawls. This will tell you if your new updates have been captured by Google and you should expect their results in the SEO performance data.
Pages Per Visit
The number of pages per visit may be valuable for you depending on your strategy. If your strategy is to keep users on the site and lead them to perform actions like reading more blog posts and getting information or checking out different products and buying one, then you should note the pages per visit of each visitor as well.
You should also take into account the time of a user on each page to learn the impact of the page on the user. However, a low amount of time spent on a page doesn’t necessarily mean that the page is ineffective because Contact Us and similar pages have a low average time on the page.
Conclusion
SEO requires constant effort so you need to review the key performance metrics all the time for making changes in your SEO strategy. Don’t settle on a low ranking and use a white label rank checker and other tools to improve your performance.
